The business of building a connected world, also referred to as the Internet of Things, is rapidly growing. Some industry analysts have estimated that the number of connected devices and systems (in an industrial, consumer, government, and business setting) may rise from five billion devices to a trillion devices over the next ten years.
A given cluster of devices may include upwards of hundreds of thousands of devices or more. Persistence connectivity can be used to lower the CPU and memory usage for a given connection, which reduces the cost of such connectivity and is, particularly, beneficial when there are such a vast number of connected devices. Persistence connectivity generally refers to a single connection between devices, which once established is used to send and receive multiple requests/responses between the devices.
In one type of distributed computing architecture, one or more business logic servers (referred to as a “platform servers”) are employed to service data and information for hundreds of thousands or more computing devices. These servers may be designated, for example, based on a given geographic region. For example, a platform server may service a group of devices in North America or the East Coast. The number of devices connecting to these servers typically exceeds the resource capacity of such servers. To this end, intermediary servers may be employed to manage the connections between the computing devices and the platform servers. Because of the potential benefit in efficiency operation, persistent connectivity may reduce the number of intermediary servers or platform servers necessary to provide data service to a given number of computing devices.
When operating a load-balanced service, maintaining information that must or should be kept across the multiple requests in a user's session is useful. This information is typically referred to as a session state. A common example of an application that uses session state is a Web browser that uses cookies. However, a typical persistence connections between two network nodes use each other's network configuration. To this end, multiplexing persistence connection may cause the state information to be lost.